There are plenty of Adwords courses that claim to teach you the "secret" to making money with Google Adwords. Yes, these courses DO teach you different strategies for improving your clickthrough rate and the quality of your ads but they fail miserably when it comes to the one MAJOR aspect of Google Adwords that you must know to make money and this is...
Finding profitable keywords.
No matter how well written your ad is, without the right keywords you won't make money.
Step by step example on how to find the right keywords.
Step 1 - Finding keywords
I'm assuming that you already have a product you want to promote. In the following steps just substitute your product for the example product that I'm going to use. I'm going to use a keyword research software program for my example.
The first thing we need is a broad keyword that relates to our product. I will use the keyword - "keyword research". Your keyword can be a phrase, two words or just a single term - just be sure it is the most general query that someone would use in Google to search for your product.
Once you have your keyword go to Google and enter it in the search box and query it.
Step 2 - Spy on Competition
Your query will generate a list of websites that Google ranks as the most relevant to your search term. These sites are always listed on the left side of the page. These are the sites that you will one day want to get listed ahead of if you want free Google traffic. To do this you will need to learn SEO techniques which is beyond the scope of this article. What you need to take note of are the listings on the right side of the page under "sponsored links".
Why? Well these are the people who are using Adwords to generate traffic for their sites. They pay Google a fee per click to get traffic. We'll want to pick one or more of the websites that are advertising in the Google Adwords section of Google. You can see above that I've chosen www.KeywordsAnalyzer.com. This is the website that I'll be monitoring over the next several weeks.
The idea here is that the longer a website bids on a keyword, the greater the chance that the keyword is profitable (i.e. It's making them money!). Think of TV or Radio - the longer an ad runs in a magazine, tv, radio or a newspaper, the greater the chance it's making the owner money, or they wouldn't keep advertising the same ad.
Don't gloss this over - this IS the secret to making money online - let other people do your trial and error for you. We are going to spy on a successful website and find which keywords they use to make money and then use them ourselves. If the site I have picked runs the same ads for a long period of time we can be pretty sure it's profitable or the owner just likes to waste money. The former is the more likely answer.
Step 3
The next step is to use a keyword generation software program OR come up with a big list of related keywords yourself. I'd recommend at least using a free keyword tool like the Overture search term suggestion tool (http://www.inventory.overture.com) and entering your main keyword. Personally, I find the free tools don't give me the number of keywords I need, and they also work much slower. I use Keyword Elite to generate bigger lists of keywords... But, like I said, you can still use a free tool and it should work "ok".
I'm assuming you dont' have Keyword Elite yet, so in this example we'll use the Overture search term suggestion tool. If you do have Keyword Elite, use that software instead.
We'll enter the keyword "keyword research" into Overture and click "ok"
You can see that the Overture tool gives us a larger list of keywords we can work with. We'll then need to copy and paste those keywords into an Excel spreadsheet. What we're going to do is we'll go back to Google and "one by one" we're going to see if www.KeywordsAnalyzer.com is bidding on any of these keywords.
Take a look at the Excel spreadsheet below to see what I mean...
All we need to do now is go through our list of keywords and manually check Google to see if our website is advertising using each of the keywords. We'll do this once every 1-3 days and update our spreadsheet accordingly.
After at least 3 weeks, we'll then look at our spreadsheet and take those keywords that www.KeywordsAnalyzer.com has been bidding on, for the longest period of time... and use those keywords for our own Adwords ad, nearly guaranteeing our chances of also being profitable!
The principle is very simple here. Don't gloss over this... The longer a website is advertising with a keyword, they're either making money with the keyword OR they're extremely stupid and are throwing money away. Chances are, it's the former.
For the longest time, I did the exact steps above manually like I've shown you. It works very well, although it does take a bit of time to manually check each keyword and update your spreadsheet. Especially if you have, say 100 keywords... let alone 1,000!
Automated keyword generation programs
Earlier I mentioned I use Keyword Elite to generate big keyword lists, well, I also use Keyword Elite to automatically do the process above for me. I don't have to do anything but paste in the URL I want to analyze, and paste in the keywords I want to monitor. Click ok... and Keyword Elite does all this for me :-)
Let's go through the steps using Keyword Elite, for those of you that already own Keyword Elite or if you decide to ever get a copy, you'll know exactly what to do to get tons of profitable keywords quickly.
Using Keyword Elite to get your profitable list of keywords...
Step 1
Open Keyword Elite and select project 5 and click "ok"
Step 2
Click the "new project" button and then enter a project name. We'll just enter a project name titled "keyword research" since that's the name of the main keyword we used to generate our keyword list. The project name can be anything, but should be something you'll remember later. Reason being, you can create as many projects as you want, to track as many keywords and websites as you want...
Step 3
Click the "edit project" button to enter our keywords and URL. We'll enter the website URL: www.keywordsanalyzer.com
and the keywords:
keyword research
keyword ppc research
keyword research tool
highbeam keyword research search web
keyword marketing research
keyword research service
engine keyword ranking research search
keyword research software
keyword research tracking
keyword research seo
highbeam keyword question research save
keyword research services
free keyword research tool
keyword popularity research
article document keyword question research save search
keyword professional research
engine engine keyword research search search tip
free keyword research
instant keyword research
ft keyword lauderdale research
If I were to only use Keyword Elite, I would have generated a keyword list of over 5,000 keywords and then just copied those keywords into project 5, which would only take a couple minutes... but in this example, let's just use this small keyword list that the Overture Search Term suggestion tool created for us.
Click "ok"... and then move to the next step.
Step 4
The next step is to just click the "run now" button and Keyword Elite will then go to Google and will tell us whether the website is bidding on any of those keywords listed. It only take a couple seconds to complete. When finished, the screen will look like this:
Keyword Elite will show you the website you're monitoring, as well as the keyword, The date Keyword Elite checked to see if the website was bidding on the keyword. Whether the website is bidding on the keyword, the number of days the keyword has been found... And it will also list the Title of the ad, the description of the ad, and the actual URL being used in the ad.
On top of that, you can even set Keyword Elite to run on a scheduler at a specified time each day, so you literally have to do nothing once you've input your keywords!
To set it on a scheduler, just click the scheduler button and you'll be prompted through a little wizard asking when you'd like to run Keyword Elite, as shown below:
As you can see, whether you decide to go the manual route, OR the automated route, you'll get the same results... and that is, you'll make money, and better yet... you'll prevent Google from taking your money!
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